Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War

Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations

Silvio Pons, Federico Romero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780714684925
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317531500
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the activities of individuals, organizations, and nations increasingly occur in cyberspace, the security of those activities is becoming a growing concern. Political, economic and military leaders must manage and reduce the level of risk associated with threats from hostile states, malevolent nonstate actors such as organized terrorist groups or individual hackers, and high-tech accidents. The impact of the information technology revolution on warfare, global stability, governance, and even the meaning of existing security constructs like deterrence is significant. These essays examine the ways in which the information technology revolution has affected the logic of deterrence and crisis management, definitions of peace and war, democratic constraints on conflict, the conduct of and military organization for war, and the growing role of the private sector in providing security. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Contemporary Security Policy.

Part I

Long duration,
globalization and the
changing frame of
the Cold War

1 The Cold War as an era of imperial rivalry

Charles S. Maier

The collapse of the Soviet system, both in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself, was an unprecedented event. No grand imperial construction has ever dissolved so quickly without experiencing defeat in a great war. How and why did such a rapid disintegration take place? This chapter presents a general perspective on this question rather than a narrative examination. It suggests that historians should reconceive of the Soviet–US antagonism that lasted from the late 1940s until the end of the 1980s as a type of imperial rivalry and should then ask why one form of empire prevailed over the other. In fact, the international history of the twentieth century can be summarized as a ‘transit of empire’: from the ascendancy of Britain (and, to a lesser degree, France) as colonial powers at the turn of the century, to the unsuccessful challenges by Germany and Japan that were intended to establish European and Asian hegemony (1914–45), to the dual domination of the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945, and the survival of the United States as ‘the only remaining superpower’ after 1989. This is a most general perspective of events. What historical insights can it actually offer?

The ‘Soviet Empire’ is a familiar concept. Although the term was often used as a political slogan, it was not without a basis in reality. Soviet military strength helped to bolster a supranational domination of other nations from 1945 to 1948. Force was mobilized in 1953, 1956 and 1968 to maintain Soviet domination in eastern Europe. Analysts suggested in the early 1990s that the end of the communist system amounted, in effect, to the final wave of decolonization. But that analogy is misleading. Decolonization meant the recovery of independence by overseas territories. Such a divestiture sometimes involved a regime change in the metropole, such as happened with the collapse of the Fourth French Republic in 1958 or the Portuguese Revolution of the Carnations in 1974. In any event, however, the home territories never disintegrated during decolonization; they remained functioning states. In contrast, what happened at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s was a fragmentation of Soviet and Communist Party political space at home as well as in the ‘near abroad’, a dissolution born of entirely different reasons than those that provoked the earlier waves of overseas decolonization.

Similarly, the anti-Soviet coalition led by the United States has been conceived of as a sort of US empire, although one organized on distinct principles, what Geir Lundestad has famously described as an ‘empire by invitation’. In earlier essays I, too, sought to put forward a historical perspective through which to understand the type of imperial construction coordinated by the United States.¹ In this chapter I wish to return to the idea of empire, but with the added advantage of two further decades of hindsight. Whether because of the reunification of Germany and post-communist politics in eastern Europe, or the episodes of endemic violence in the Balkans, central Asia and Africa, or the preoccupation with political Islam, or even the dramatic events of 11 September, enough post-Cold War history has now taken place to provide us with a better sense of perspective when examining the earlier era of stable antagonism.

In fact, I am less interested in the Cold War as a unique confrontation than I am in the Cold War as a chapter in the establishment of ‘order’ in world politics. I would not go so far as John Gaddis and describe it as a ‘long peace’,² for in too many instances it verged on disastrous world conflict – over Berlin in 1948, over Korea during the winter of 1950–51 and over Cuba in 1962. If the Cold War brought peace, it was peace by the skin of our teeth. Nonetheless, the era of the Cold War did produce a type of world order. The idea of ‘order’ implies a sort of equilibrium in international politics. This does not eliminate international armed violence but keeps its scope below what organized war between the Great Powers would have entailed. The Cold War was, thus, while not an era of peace, at least one of controlled conflictuality. The underlying hypothesis is that, in recent historical times, this kind of world order has been associated with various sorts of imperial organization of the world, or of a significant part of it. And empires, significantly, tend to localize warfare at their frontiers while they keep the peace within.

Empire does not necessarily mean a multi-ethnic unit forged by conquest. It could also signify a leading power’s coordination of diverse national elites who are willing to limit their own people’s assertion of political independence in return for security or prestige. In a successful empire, these local elites remain oriented toward a hegemonic metropole whose leadership they accept and with whom they cooperate in constructing an accompanying system of economic and cultural exchange. If the term ‘empire’ is too harsh, perhaps ‘imperial system’ is a bit easier to live with. An empire can be an extensive unit created by conquest or it can be, in effect, a coalition of allied states that defer to a primus inter pares and who share international ambitions. Those ambitions can be ostensibly defensive; nonetheless, they must be multi-dimensional, that is, they must be designed to achieve economic as well as political goals.

The imperial agenda, it should be emphasized, does not require mass adhesion. True, widespread discontent can undermine an empire, but the so-called masses are not really instrumental in initiating an empire, even if the Soviet system continually used the concept of the masses to legitimize its own creation of so-called popular democracies. Indeed, empires tend to widen the gap within their domestic political communities between what might be termed a senatorial elite (whether determined by wealth, education, prominence in the media and professions, or party affiliation) and a more passive citizenry that enters the public domain largely as spectators. Political participation is reduced to plebiscitory consultations: public opinion is massaged and measured or given an expressive outlet – the poll and the ‘talk show’. Short of mass defection in the streets, an active, formative role on policy on the part of the general public is difficult to sustain. Imperial politics tends to minimize the ‘voice’ option in Hirschman’s famous typology of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. The result is a polarization between exit and loyalty.

Imperial systems are rarely static. They usually exist in a state of territorial flux and institutional tension. Empires are intrinsically hierarchical; they recruit compliant local elites as public servants. And they are not, despite the terminology adopted in ancient Rome or the contemporary United States, actually republican in the classic sense, although their local politics are often formally democratic. They can allow expressions of opinion and the ratification of decisions by majorities. Empires are also necessarily preoccupied by frontiers: there is often disorder on the frontier, both inside and outside, that must be suppressed. More precisely, ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’ are the terms that the imperial elites employ to categorize the endemic violence that the border helps create. The enemies of empire consider the same phenomena to be resistance.

Empires thus claim to practice formal equality while they remain stratified constructions, both as international institutions and as socio-political systems at home, although successful empires always know how to co-opt outsiders. Internationally, they have a center and a periphery. Investment capital flows from the imperial concentration of inequality at its center; surplus labor, usually unskilled, flows from the periphery (whether the periphery inside Europe or outside Europe) towards the center. By the end of the nineteenth century and the emergence of general male suffrage at the center of Western imperial systems, this differential distribution of wealth and capital faced a legitimation problem resulting from the subsequent inequality. Marxian and neo-Marxian critics, above all, criticized empires for their prolongation of inequality, for the exploitation they supposedly facilitated, and for their potential for conflict and war. On the other hand, by the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union and the major liberal capitalist power joined forces to defeat the Axis, apologists for imperial systems found persuasive counter-arguments that justified imperial inequality. When the United States emerged as supreme, these inequalities were referred to as ‘development’ or ‘productivity’. But empires also manifest hierarchies within the metropole as well. They elevate certain elements by according power, status and wealth. They also accommodate the aspirations of diverse groups to achieve a livelihood, a family, or just make a go of it in a complex society. Diversity is a saving grace. The imperial metropolis was polyglot and composed of the races to be ruled – represented in a token if not a real way. It was characterized by a special sort of group tolerance, as Michael Walzer makes clear in his recent lectures on toleration: ‘Imperial autonomy … tolerates groups and their authority structures and customary practices, not (except in a few cosmopolitan centers and capital cities) free-floating men and women.’³

Before World War I there were two sorts of empires. The first were land-based states that had expanded over the course of centuries: Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman domain and China. Despite the era’s industrial development these empires remained significantly agrarian and semi-authoritarian. The second group of empires included maritime, overseas empires: British, Dutch, French, the remnants of the Spanish and Portuguese realms, and the new Japanese, German, Italian and United States acquisitions. The land-based empires were in crisis – witness the Russian revolution of 1905, the Chinese revolution of 1911 and the Austro-Hungarian ethnic contentions – in part because of national and ethnic aspirations among their populations, in part because of their laggardness in modernizing their armed forces and, most clearly in Europe, because of the profound changes that had transformed the European countryside and agrarian relations over the course of the previous century. The landed empires were based on patrimonial landed relations. These were undermined by land and labor markets that had intruded into the countryside.

The crises that overcame the old empires were also connected with the rivalries among the outer ring of new overseas empires, for the world’s alliance system interlocked newer overseas empires with at least one traditional land-based empire that was experiencing internal tensions. It was the interaction between, on the one hand, the decomposition of the landed empires and, on the other hand, the rivalries between overseas empires that led to World War I. The result was the discredit and the ultimate collapse of the old empires, even as the war allowed the Allies to aggrandize their new overseas empires. The war increased the popularity of anti-imperial notions of national self-determination that were based on the ideas of 1789 and the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson. In Wilson’s view, world stability would be reconstructed on the basis of national self-determination and collective action to keep the peace. But for all the praise, autonomous nation-states could not turn the League of Nations into a well-functioning institution, and international settlements were repeatedly violated by force in the 1930s. And so, nation-states failed to function as guarantors of international order precisely in that period when they were assigned that role, that is, between the two world wars. It also became clear that the overseas imperial powers were going to be challenged, in part by the ideologies they championed at home, in part by the conflicts among the peoples they sought to rule. Independence movements and colonial labor movements were not yet strong enough to prevail, but after 1919 they emerged as a permanent challenge to imperial rule.

No stable imperial structure re-emerged until the US quasi-empire of the post-World War II era. The German and Japanese challenges were sufficient to help bring an end to the British and French empires, but not strong enough to maintain themselves against the rising Soviet and US empires. Between 1948 and 1989 two major imperial systems coexisted – the Soviet and the US – achieving and imposing international stability in part as a function of their very rivalry. However, they worked on very different constituent principles.

During the first half of this four-decade period, the US empire functioned by paying for a combination of political and economic regulatory principles and by policing the frontiers with its military. Washington supported political pluralism among its alliance partners, although it tolerated authoritarian regimes as expedients if they were friendly. Through the Marshall Plan and other aid programs, it sought to encourage open economies that allowed private investment and entrepreneurship. It sought to convince both its domestic labor unions and those among its aid recipients abroad that wage increases must be limited by the growth of productivity, and it made yearly increments in economic output (growth) the major criterion for judging economic policy success.⁴ But the United States also had to revert to the traditional military buttresses of empire. It organized a major alliance system and kept troops on the German frontier to confront the rival empire (a rivalry that also helped sustain ideological discipline). It kept troops (and still keeps them) on the major military frontier in Asia, the 38th parallel. And from time to time, and with less success, it intervened in the so-called Third World, which was also the periphery (Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America) of imperial control.

The US empire was a continuation and, in fact, an enhancement of the older British imperial principles of economic ascendancy. Economic prowess provided the material public good that made US preponderance seem beneficial to its clients and allies. In effect, the United States established an empire of Fordist production from 1941 to 1973, beginning with the industrial supplies sent by the United States to Russia and Britain during the war, and continuing with aid for post-war reconstruction (that excluded the Soviet Union after 1947).⁵ The United States excelled in systems of mass production of (mechanized) agriculture, heavy and basic industrial goods (steel and steel products), and consumer goods. The damage that the continental European economies had sustained in the war made the United States’ relative lead in these spheres all the more preponderant. These resources, however, had lost their earlier efficacy by the end of the 1960s. The consensual rules of neo-Keynesianism at home, the US unwillingness to sustain discipline in its balance on current accounts, the end of cheap energy prices after the oil crisis of early 1974, and Europe’s own success in catching up to US production techniques – all meant that Washington’s resources became less of a guarantee of ascendancy. And yet, the United States enjoyed a renewed economic ascendancy in the 1980s. The unexpected success of pre-Keynesian monetarism, the United States’ mastery of a new post-industrial technology – computers and media – and the importance of ‘cultural’ exports (whether jeans, rock and roll, Coca-Cola or MTV) and the growth of English as a world language revived a flagging vital principle.

At the same time, the principles upon which the Soviet empire was built became increasingly obsolescent. One can analyze this obsolescence on several levels. On one hand, the Soviets’ relative backwardness was a failure of economic growth. Although the Soviets remained roughly equivalent in terms of the large-scale or mass-produced physical output characteristic of the industrial age through the 1950s – whether measured by subways, large aircraft or rockets – they lagged in the computer technology and its applications in the post-Fordist decades. Moreover, they had to claim a share of national income far larger than the West’s approximately 5 per cent in order to sustain a rough military parity. More generally, the Soviets fell behind in the panoply of consumer goods that the East Germans called ‘the thousand little things’, and they had to make do with a satisfaction of housing needs far below the level of the West. But there were more general problems as well. The complexity of what we might call post-industrial aspirations seemed to outrun the supply of goods that might satisfy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Cass Series: Cold War history
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Long duration, globalization and the changing frame of the Cold War
• 1 The Cold War as an era of imperial rivalry
• 2 Power, politics, and the long duration of the Cold War
• 3 On recule pour mieux sauter, or ‘What needs to be done' (to understand the 1970s)
• 4 The Cold War considered as a US project
• 5 Beginnings of the end How the Cold War crumbled
• 6 Karol Wojtyla and the end of the Cold War
• PART II The end of the Cold War and the downfall of Soviet communism
• 7 Economic information in the life and death of the Soviet command system
• 8 Ideas and the end of the Cold War Rethinking intellectual and political change
• 9 Unwrapping an enigma Soviet elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War
• 10 1989: history is rewritten
• 11 Gorbachev and the demise of east European communism
• 12 The end of Soviet communism A review
• Index